


So Much Wasted in the Afternoon

by waltzmatildah



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 22:16:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10706247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: Set following the season 6 finale: Because you can't hold a man's hand while he bleeds to death at your feet and not want toknowthings in the aftermath...(Heads up for those who may have forgotten - it's been a while, after all. Mary Portman was the character played by Mandy Moore.)





	So Much Wasted in the Afternoon

__

_We will be spilled in blood_  
_and this is the way that they'll remember us_  
_emerge from the shadows we will_  
_emerge from the shadows._

 

In the smoke stained aftermath of blood red bed sheets and pizza orders that never amounted to anything, she develops a morbid fascination for all things Seattle Grace Mercy West. She scours news articles with a methodical precision, channel flicks through the static with a speed that sends her reeling, devours newspaper features line by line 'til her fingertips are stained a perpetual dark grey.

She types his name into a google search. Pokes at the keys with shaky fingers, drags in an even shakier breath and stares at the flickering screen until the image of him is burned into the synapses of her brain. Discovers more about him in death than she could ever hoped to have known in life.

He had brothers, she reads. And a big sister. Nephews and nieces and best friends and ex-lovers and teachers and neighbours and college professors.

Parents and basketball team mates and aunts and bar tenders and librarians and football buddies and in the space of a splitting gun shot he was taken from them all.

She wonders how the columns would read if it had been her instead.

Bleeding out and begging beside a motionless salvation that wasn't to be.

 

 

 

\- - -

 

 

 

A newscaster reads from a list of names. The 'deceased', she reports. Her heart skips a beat. Stills strangely for seconds in her chest when she hears a Reed Adamson was also killed. _Reed._ She remembers that name, it's disconcertingly familiar as it rolls off her tongue, and it takes her several days of ruminating to figure out why. The infinite sadness of the situation is saved only by her firm belief that the two of them, wherever they are, they're together.

Because girls always know and she refuses to believe any of that changes in heaven.

 

 

 

\- - -

 

 

 

Her husband baulks at the idea. Says it's morbid and inappropriate and too soon or not soon enough and that she needs to move forward. He's well meaning and earnest and the unbridled terror that has stained his face in the hours and days that have followed is a tangible reminder of what they almost lost, so she very nearly gives in. Very nearly acquiesces with barely a whimper.

Very nearly...

But not quite.

She stands at the back of the burgeoning crowd while he's lowered into the cold, hard ground. A black dress and a black hat and a clenched kleenex in her fist her only disguise. She sees Doctor B, Miranda, they're on a first name basis now, and they lock eyes across the misted expanse of grass that separates them but they don't approach each other and they don't speak.

The enormity of what they went through together is still too raw and still too raging for that.

 

 

 

\- - -

 

 

 

In the months and years that follow she visits his grave every now and then. Never on the anniversary of his death, she spends that day with her husband and her kids and she counts every ticking, ticking second of it as a blessing. But on other more random and infinitely more meaningful days of the year she finds herself picking a path across the soft grass just to say _Hi_ or _Sorry_ or _I still think about you sometimes_...

Like days when the snow falls for the first time. Or when her favourite song comes on the radio and she drives without thinking about where she's going. Or when mango ice cream is on sale at the supermarket and she can't take it home because she never was all that good at sharing.

There is no rhyme or reason to her visits, just like there was no rhyme or reason to his death.

 

 

 

\- - -

 

 

 

She held his hand while his body slowly emptied all his blood at her feet. She had vital parts of him under her fingernails and threaded through the strands of her hair. She sat curled by his side and crying as he breathed his final breath.

 

And so, in the smoke stained aftermath of all of that, she googles his name with her breath held and her fingers unsteady on the keys, and drives slices of pizza (pepperoni and sausage and ham) to his grave site as a desperate apology for everything it was that she couldn't be.

And for everything it was that she could...


End file.
